Kerouac Tastes Benny

Several days after Burroughs's first visit to the apartment on Henry Street, Benzedrine entered the life of Jack Kerouac.

Burroughs and Kerouac had been sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park at the time, talking about death. "Well, what do you think happens when we die, Bill?" Kerouac had wanted to know. "What do I think happens when we die? When you die, well, then, you're dead, my boy," Burroughs had been saying, "that's what happens after you die," when they saw Huncke passing by.

Burroughs made the introduction. Huncke thought Kerouac looked like "a typical clean cut American...like the Arrow collar man, his eyes were flashing all around as he took everything in." Huncke recalls that Burroughs then tried to talk Kerouac into shooting up, but Kerouac was leery of the needle. “At that time he had only smoked a little pot."

Kerouac may not have been interested in shooting up, but he was very interested in visiting the apartment on Henry Street. Several days later, he found himself walking up the five flights of rickety steps with Burroughs, knocking on the door. It was opened by a curvy, statuesque redhead dressed only in a robe. Kerouac peered in and was intrigued to see her stockings and undergarments all drying on a line across the apartment. Burroughs informed the girl that they had been hanging out with Huncke up on 103rd Street. "We were talking, you see," he sniffed, "and we thought we might pick up a little junk."

Vicky Russell found the thin man with the glasses looking for junk quite amusing. She could appreciate a character like Burroughs. The daughter of a Detroit judge who had run away to New York, she was staying at the apartment and using drugs with Huncke and Sailor and Brandenburg. She also happened to be a prostitute, though she kept that particular detail to herself for the time being. At first glance she knew that Burroughs was naive about drugs, despite his request for "junk." Few people in town knew more about drugs than Vicky Russell, in fact, or where and how to get them. She invited them in, but it wasn't drugs that Jack Kerouac seemed interested in.

"I have a boy friend in the navy," Vicky informed Kerouac after he tried to pick her up in his own shy, stammering way.

Kerouac banged his head comically against the wall to demonstrate his profound disappointment regarding that tragic fact. "Aw, it makes no difference," he told her.

She looked him over: the dark hair, the football player's build, the sad blue eyes. "Well, all right, man," she said, "we'll pick up," using the jazz code phrase for getting high on the kind of stuff you could go to jail for.

Kerouac was overjoyed. "Do you pick up, jazz baby?"

"I pick up with Charlie Ventura."

So they all got in a cab and went racing up to Times Square. They were sitting in Benny Goodman's Pickarib when Vicky Russel produced the three Benzedrine tubes.

"You take this one, you take this one," she told them, handing them each a tube, "you break it open, and you eat everything in there."

Kerouac had known about Benzedrine but had never tried it. He knew that Charlie Parker and many of the other musicians he admired who were playing at Minton’s Playhouse took it, prying the tops off of the little white Benzedrex inhalers that were manufactured by Smith Kline and French, and taking out the amphetamine-soaked strip of yellow gauze marked Poison and soaking it in coffee or soda or cocktails and drinking it, or just plain rolling it up in a nasty bitter little ball and swallowing it down, which is precisely what the three of them proceeded to do right there at the table.

As the drug began to hit, Kerouac began looking quickly around. The effect was outlandish. Almost immediately he found himself dissociating from his environment. Times Square had completely transmogrified into a place he no longer recognized. It was funny, wild; he had gotten so high, so fast, that he began to think he was in another country…

"Are we in St. Petersburg? Are we in St. Petersburg, Russia?"

Kerouac knew he was talking nonsense but couldn't stop himself. Talking up a storm was one thing but this was a kind of hyper- loquaciousness he had never known. He couldn’t seem to control his mouth.

"Are we in Chicago? Are we in Katmandu?"

Then they got in a cab, all of them riotously high, and Burroughs paid the fare as Vicky took them all around Times Square looking to pick up on some tea. It was a tour unlike any that either of them had ever experienced of the place. She made them cruise up and down each and every block, repeatedly, and at every street corner she would scream, "Stop!"--and go jumping out of the cab, running up to every zoot-suited character on the street--

"Hey, Ray!"

"Hey, Mac!"

"Hey, ba-by!"

"Anything, man?"

--before hearing, "Nothing, ba-by!" Then she’d clamber back into the car on her high heels, pouting, and order, "Drive on!"

It went on like that until it was obvious there was no tea to be had in all of Manhattan but now Kerouac was even higher and more entranced by her. Before he knew it he found himself clutching onto a strap of the F Train as it went barreling down town, pressed tightly up against Burroughs and Vicky Russell, his heart pounding and his mouth dry as cotton balls, the words rushing out of his mouth so fast but still unable to catch up with the thoughts firing off in his racing brain, digging Burroughs as if he had never really appreciated him before, the two of them looking into each other's eyes and it felt like they were really connecting for the first time as people and friends, digging everything and everyone not only on the train but in the whole world, especially this crazy gone redhead named Vicky--

"My ears are ringing," he kept exclaiming, "I don't know where I am!"

"You're buzzing," she kept laughing. "You're buzzing, baby!"

For the next forty-eight straight hours Kerouac had sex with her, and when it was over it felt like he had lost ten pounds. He had never been so high in his life, and had never felt so spent after it was over, so jangled and savagely depressed after the great towering exhilaration of the high. He had been so high, in fact, that he had completely forgotten about his father, who was sick out in Ozone Park, and thinking about his father after the high was like the sudden reacquisition of some lost, shattering knowledge.

But during the adventure, Kerouac had noticed something about Times Square. He had felt something about all the people passing by. As he later described it in his first novel, The Town and the City, the people he had observed were "the same people he had seen in so many other American cities on similar streets: soldiers, sailors, the panhandlers and drifters, the zoot-suiters, the hoodlums, the young men who washed dishes in cafeterias from coast to coast, the hitchhikers, the hustlers, the drunks, the battered lonely young Negroes, the twinkling little Chinese, the dark Puerto Ricans, and the varieties of dungareed young Americans in leather jackets who were seamen and mechanics and garagemen everywhere...All the cats and characters, all the spicks and spades, Harlem-drowned, street-drunk and slain, crowded together, streaming back and forth, looking for something, waiting for something, forever moving around..."

There was a quality of furtiveness about them, Kerouac realized, something lost and rootless. He had seen a quality in the people that he had long felt deep inside himself, and the experience of the drug he had taken had only seemed to heighten the perception. As depleted as he felt after that first Benzedrine adventure, he couldn't get his impressions down in the little five cent notebook he always carried around in his shirt pocket fast enough.

---

Lately Things Don’t Seem the Same

Sgt. Brian Relate of New Jersey heard the explosions through the screeching guitars of Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys and instantly realized it had been a mistake to take the purple haze that night.

Relate had just been getting off when the base lights suddenly popped off and the sirens began to wail. He ran outside and went hurtling down into the first bunker he saw. As he listened to the erupting crump crump of mortar explosions and the crackling of small arms fire, he saw the beam of an officer’s flashlight come swinging in after them. Relate couldn’t believe what the light looked like as it went cutting through the opaque blackness of the bunker. It was like the searchlight of some extraterrestrial Hollywood movie premier. When he realized that he could actually hear the electronic displacement of the darkness by the particles of light against his eardrums, he realized how high he was.

“You men in here, grab your weapons and get out to the perimeter now!” The officer barked at them.

“No,” someone said from the back of the bunker, “ we can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t, get the fuck out there!”

Relate had no weapon with him. Maybe it wasn’t really an attack at all. Things were never what they appeared to be in Vietnam, just like the pack of Lifesavers that his buddy John was carrying around hadn’t really been a pack of Lifesavers at all but tabs of acid. Relate remembered what the candle in the hootch had looked like after he swallowed one and was staring at it as he started getting off, laughing at how funny the Vietnamese had looked, too, but then he had realized that some of them might have been VC sappers and that didn’t seem so funny. It was a very weird feeling but no less weird than the knowledge that if his Mormon captain ever found out that he’d taken the acid, he’d be busted straight to Long Binh, so he obeyed the officer and walked out into the night. Sure enough, there was an attack going on. Men were running and shouting everywhere, but all Relate could do was stand there and stare at the show--

“Whoa, motherfucker!”

Everything was sparkling and the light itself seemed to fracture into phosphorescent atomic particles of orange and white. Magnesium flares were hanging up in the sky, illuminating the fields and rice paddies out beyond the wire. Beyond that he could make out the dark outlines of the jungle line and the distant mountains. First the flares looked like celestial bulbs streaming down from outer space but then they turned into the eyes of some hellish monster. Lines of tracer fire began arcing out through the dark like long glittery red ribbons. There was a fire fight going on out there but all he could look at were the fiery white sparks showering down from the flares—

“Ooooooh!”

Relate knew there was a good possibility that men were dying out there somewhere and realized how ugly that was but mostly he was astonished by the rush because it all seemed to go through his body in different colors and that was when the huge crunching orange explosion engulfed one of the Hueys behind him, picking it up and sending it turning up into the sky like a toy before it came back down in blazing little parts—

“Wow!”

Every conceivable weapon was barking and flashing out along the wire and that was when the Cobra gunships came floating in like stuttering mechanical dragonflies and the sky began raining flame. He had never seen anything so refulgent, so awe inspiring in his life as the 7.62 electric mini-guns of those helicopters pouring down 2,000 rounds per minute on the distant hillsides. It looked like glowing liquefied lead and it was like his brain could not register how anything so lethal could look so exquisite. It was over in minutes, even faster than it had started. The night went completely silent, and for a moment all he could hear was the hum of the base generators. Then someone started playing Cat Mother and the All Night Newsboys again on the reel-to-reel. When one of his buddies came by and saw him just standing there open-mouthed and asked him what the hell he was doing, all he could do was shake his head.

It was the summer of 1969. Elements of the NVA had just probed the Americal Division at Chu Lai.

© Copyright 2004 Martin Torgoff. All rights reserved.